It is becoming increasingly apparent that cognitive systems are creating a new type of partnership between humans and technology. There are matters that humans excel at such as common sense, morals, imagination, and addressing dilemmas. Conversely, there are places where cognitive systems outshine humans such as analytics pattern identification, locating knowledge, natural language processing at scale, machine learning, or even eliminating biases. These new cognitive systems are fundamentally different from prior traditional programmed computing systems in that they can understand, reason, and learn.

What can you do with all these new capabilities? In the video and media industry, these capabilities are indeed useful. For instance, AI can assist publishers to better understand their content, swiftly diagnose delivery and quality issues, or even predict viewer behavior. During the Streaming Video Alliance discussion, I highlighted how Conviva uses automation and artificial intelligence to help publishers improve their QoE. Along with Pete Mastin, Watson Media, Strategy & Business Development with IBM, I stressed AI modeling goals which include detection with real-time notification of “events of importance,” sharp diagnosis with recommended actions based on event detection, and, most critically, prediction of system anomalies and user behavior.

Pete explained how IBM Watson leverages artificial intelligence for video enrichment. Enriched content is inherently more searchable, and research has shown that improved content discovery in consumer service leads to increased usage. As a result, the sophisticated systems developed by IBM are also well-suited to power content search and discovery solutions. Another exciting application demonstrated was the IBM Ted Challenge. The team at IBM built a cognitive “discovery engine” that allows users to explore ideas inside TED Talk videos via question and answer using a metadata search in natural language.

Another area where AI is making in-roads is with real-time optimized delivery intelligence. Conviva’s Precision solution takes granular real-time user experience data and then optimizes the video delivery across the Internet with significant results. In addition, Conviva’s Video AI Alerting solution is now able to diagnose root cause and identify the components that have and will break. With these solutions, Conviva demonstrates how machine learning is used to optimize user engagement and now leveraged as a churn reduction predictor and tool.

AI and media are at the intersection of many possibilities and constant innovation. There is little doubt that new AI use cases and applications will soon emerge to bring even further enhancement to the media industry’s capabilities. For more information, view the complete video.